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Sweetbreads with Black Butter
Boil the sweetbreads, and then press them between two plates until cold. Cut them into thin slices, and rub them in plenty of flour. Put one and one-half pounds of butter into a fryingpan, and stir it over the fire until frothy and brown, then put in the sweetbreads, and brown on both sides. When cooked place the sweetbreads on a hot dish, garnish with a few olives and slices of lemon, put a little of the browned butter over, and serve.
A plain Waldorf service dish written for a professional line, which explains both the missing quantities and the alarming amount of butter. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to clean a sweetbread.
- The butter is restaurant scaleOne and a half pounds is a hotel pan's worth, far more than a single order needs. For two or three sweetbreads at home, 4 to 6 tablespoons in a wide skillet is right.
- Preparation the recipe assumesVeal sweetbreads need 2 to 4 hours soaking in several changes of cold water to draw out blood, then a gentle poach rather than a hard boil. After poaching, peel away the outer membrane and any fat or tubes while still warm; this is the step that separates a good sweetbread from a rubbery one.
- PressingSet the poached sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top, refrigerated for at least a few hours or overnight. This compacts the lobes so they slice cleanly and brown evenly.
- Which sweetbreadThe throat sweetbread is the thymus, elongated and looser; the round, denser heart sweetbread is the pancreas. Either works here. Buy veal rather than beef, and use within a day.
- Black butter is not burnt butterBeurre noir means butter cooked past noisette to a deep brown with a nutty smell, not to black. Once the milk solids blacken it turns acrid and cannot be recovered. Pull the pan the moment the froth subsides and the solids are the color of a hazelnut skin.
- Flouring and browningDredge just before frying, or the flour turns pasty. Slices are thin, so a minute or two per side over moderately high heat is enough; they are already cooked through from the poaching.
- The missing acidClassic black butter finishes with a splash of vinegar and often capers, which cuts the fat. Oscar gives olives and lemon instead, and squeezing the lemon over does the same work.
- YieldOne pair of veal sweetbreads, roughly a pound, serves two as a main course or four as an entrée in the older sense of a small course before the roast.
Sweetbreads were high-status hotel food in the 1890s: mild, pale, expensive per pound, and fussy enough to prove a kitchen's competence, which may help explain their prominence in Oscar Tschirky's book. Oscar, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his cookbook in 1896 as a record of the house's repertoire, and it reads throughout like notes from a professional brigade rather than a domestic manual. Beurre noir itself is an old French sauce, more usually met with skate or brains, and its appearance here reflects how thoroughly American grand-hotel cooking of the period was conducted in French idiom even when the printed menu was in English. The dish also belongs to a moment when offal was ordinary rather than adventurous; a market that sold veal sold sweetbreads, and one imagines a cook would have known how to soak, blanch and peel them.